“... relief (for he can now feel injured) she simply gets rid of the governess. In contrast to her self-restraint, there is the interlocking story of her devoted friend, Vincy. A dandyish observer of life, Vincy has a mistress, Mavis, an impoverished young art student whose red hair is ‘generally untidy at the back’. Her poverty, which brings her close to ...”

“... to ask. Eleni must have been a tough, shrewd, brave woman: I doubt whether she would have had the self-involved sentimentality to see herself as one of those ‘baby chicks, dyed a brilliant scarlet’ to be sold at Easter, and pecked to death by ‘ordinary fowl outraged at their unconventional plumage’. The dyeing and the selling are Mr Gage’s, and I ...”

“... clearly an animal. It had a distinct ‘head’ and a ‘tail’ (like the early embryo); it was self-propelling, lived in flocks and even died. It went into the egg, Andry speculated, held the door shut behind it, and grew up. The role of the egg in spermism was obvious. Though huge, it could be seen as providing food, lots of it, and a soft, roomy ...”

“... of time, but the mood of this novel is bleaker and the rummage through history blinkered by self-interest. While Still ran up against the impossibility of locating beginnings, the characters in Pieces of Light suffer from a yearning to return to or reconfigure a time before trauma. As Hugh’s war-ravaged father continues his colonisation of the ...”

“... in the mess (‘I’m a devout coward’). The novel is far too intelligent to take refuge in the self-protective attitudes with which Kingsley Amis and his friends guarded themselves by means of systematic derision from similar sorts of situation. No clowning around, no references to Bastards’ HQ and the like. For most young combatants the war became a ...”

“... matter. Why is it that only the memoir – a comprehensive genre shading off into travel books, self-creations in childhood and so forth – seems still at this moment to possess the contextual confidence and authority which once came naturally to the novel? No doubt the novel will reassert itself in time, but just now it seems to have lost its Bagshaw-like ...”

“... is a strong school of thought that any form of institutional history is no more than corporate self-aggrandisement. Of course, in many cases it is. We have all seen the glossy volumes dreamed up by the public relations (or, as they tend to be known nowadays, ‘corporate affairs’) people. Lots of pictures and a text which hypes the company while failing ...”

“... the countryside throwing up the meeting-halls that the communes needed for their mass-rallies and self-criticism sessions. Many of the interviewees work very hard: we meet a young dentist who is on call for 27 days at a stretch, takes a two-hour bus ride to her home, and spends her three-day leave coping with the month’s accumulated housework. Husbands are ...”

“... a life of its own: one conspirator, T-Jay Mackey, decides that Everett’s plan ‘was anxious and self-absorbed. It lacked the full heat of feeling. They had to take it all the way.’ The snipers must shoot to kill. But the lesson still applies. As Mackey explains: The barrier is down ... When Jack sent out the word to get Castro, he put himself in a world ...”

“... teachers; and his mother’s family were highly respectable Christian men and women, ‘self-righteous’ non-drinkers, non-smokers, non-gamblers. It is a point of Gates’s memoir that despite national social upheaval in the Sixties, Piedmont coloured did not lose their identities and sense of worth; the boy Skip was made to feel loved at all ...”

“... modern cities, the Manchester of the late Middle Ages, Florence. Her brothers are merchants, ‘self-retired/In hungry pride and gainful cowardice’, ‘ledgermen’ who stay at home. Yet slaves sweated for them ‘In torched mines and noisy factories’ and For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,      And went all naked to the hungry shark; For ...”

“... a memoir in fragments, its relative in the past would be Dante’s Vita Nuova, with its rigour of self-examination, and in more recent times, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, which does not flinch either at the constant companionship of pain. The author whispers to her friend Jim dying in a hospital bed: ‘You are surrounded by friends who love ...”

“... from the memorandum whether Kurchatov knew in July 1943 about Fermi’s success in achieving a self-sustaining chain reaction in a uranium graphite pile in Chicago the previous December’ – a much more restrained formulation. But then it was extremely improbable that Soviet espionage, which was already providing Moscow with a great deal of detail, would ...”

“... or enumerating, of a woman’s exquisite body parts with a mixture of fetishistic rapture and male self-regard. His other classical template is the flaying of Marsyas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the satyr’s terrible cry: ‘Who is it that tears me from myself?’ The flaying image is arguably more convincingly and consistently applicable to a study of ...”

“... paradox of literary survivance [sic], crucial to Western high culture from Pindar to Mallarmé and self-evidently central to Chardin’s painting, has altered.’ Indeed it has, and there may be ample reason to worry about what cyber-space and virtual reality are going to do to the so-called Gutenberg galaxy. But though one may share his nostalgia for the ...”